Science News articles from September 2004

Science News archives from September 2004

Rocky road: planet hunting gets closer to Earth.(This Week)(exoplanets)
September 4, 2004... Astronomers have discovered the three lightest planets known outside the solar system, moving researchers closer to the goal of finding extrasolar planets that resemble Earth. One of the new planets joins three others orbiting the same star,...

Electrifying toxic cleanup: electrodes could stimulate removal of radioactive waste.(This Week)
September 4, 2004... Inspired by recent successes at using microbes in fuel cells to produce energy, researchers have devised a bioremediation system that electrically stimulates bacteria to break down toxic chemicals in the environment. In a microbial fuel...

Alzheimer's advance: omega-3 fatty acid benefits mice.(This Week)
September 4, 2004... A diet that includes a key omega-3 fatty acid found in fish and canola oil prevents some memory loss in mice that develop a disease similar to Alzheimer's, researchers report in the Sept. 2 Neuron. The finding is consistent with previous...

Cultured readers: Chinese kids show new neural side of dyslexia.(This Week)
September 4, 2004... A group of Chinese grade-schoolers with severe reading difficulties has taught scientists an intriguing lesson: Brain disturbances that underlie the inability to read a non-alphabetic script, such as Chinese, differ from those already...

Scanning risk: whole-body CT exams may increase cancer.(This Week)(computerized tomography)
September 4, 2004... In recent years, computerized tomography (CT) scanning has gone commercial, as healthy people pay to have their bodies scanned for general-health screening. They may be doing themselves more harm than good. Reporting in the September...

Cancer flip-flop: gene acts in both proliferation and control of growth.(This Week)
September 4, 2004... Decades ago, cancer geneticists latched on to an attractively simple model in which only two types of genes control the disease's spread: Oncogenes trigger cancers and their growth, but tumor-suppressor genes keep cancer cells in check. ...

Tiny timepiece: atomic clock could fit almost anywhere.(This Week)
September 4, 2004... Physicists have shrunk the high-tech heart of an atomic clock to the size of a rice grain. This dramatic miniaturization may lead to widespread use of atomic clocks in battery-powered devices such as global positioning system (GPS) receivers,...

Paved paradise? Impervious surfaces affect a region's hydrology, ecosystems--even its climate.
September 4, 2004... When raindrops fall on uninhabited terrain, many things can happen. Precipitation that lands on craggy mountainsides flows downhill to streams. Drops that hit soil often soak in; some of that water later evaporates, while much of the rest seeps...

Ocean envy: scientists look toward marine creatures to improve watercraft designs.(Cover Story)
September 4, 2004... Ship propellers have served humankind well for more than a century, enabling vessels to travel in relatively straight lines over great distances. But modern engineers want to design vessels for more nuanced tasks. They want vehicles that can...

Sound power for deep-space travel beyond sun's reach.(Technology)(power generators)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2004... For voyages beyond Mars, sunlight is weak, so solar-power cells can't supply much electricity. For such missions, spacecraft typically rely on thermoelectric generators, which contain materials that produce electricity in response to the...

Vitamin E may curb colds in old folks.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2004... Vitamin E seems to help elderly people fend off colds and other upper respiratory infections, according to a study in the Aug. 18 Journal of the American Medical Association. Earlier studies of the effects of the antioxidant vitamin E...

Helping circuits get enough oxygen.(Technology)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2004... The microelectronics industry is on thin ice. There's an oxygen-rich, insulating layer inside transistors that's become dangerously thin as circuitry has shrunk. At risk is the steady pace of innovation that the industry has maintained for more...

Mexican Americans face stroke risk.(Biomedicine 1)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2004... Middle-aged Mexican Americans have roughly double the risk of stroke that non-Hispanic whites do, data from a Texas county suggest. Lewis B. Morgenstern of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues used interviews and...

Babies' sound path to language skills.(Behavior)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2004... Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that 6-month-olds who perform well on a test of budding speech perception exhibit better language development as toddlers than do those who score poorly on the same test. The test maybe able...

Pathogenic partners prompt pneumonia.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2004... Pneumonia can be caused by bacteria or any of a number of respiratory viruses. A report in the August Nature Medicine now suggests that these two classes of pathogens act more closely together in causing pneumonia than scientists had thought....

A call to arms aids recovery of sight.(Neuroscience)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2004... After suffering a stroke that damaged right-brain tissue, including the primary visual cortex, a 68-year-old college professor could no longer see most objects on his left side. Then, under the supervision of Krista Schendel and Lynn C....

Mom bears more sons when she gets extra bouquets.(Zoology)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2004... When researchers spiffup a male starling's courtship by delivering some extra bouquets to his mate on his behalf, the couple tends to produce more sons than usual. Biologists have puzzled in recent decades over whether animals switch their...

Bones Rock! Everything You Need to Know to Be a Paleontologist.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 4, 2004... BONES ROCK! Everything You Need to Know to Be a Paleontologist PETER LARSON AND KRISTIN DONNAN The authors, who live in the Black Hills of South Dakota and are avid fossil hunters, have for years imparted their enthusiasm for paleontology...

Hostas.(Books)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 4, 2004... HOSTAS ROSEMARY BARRETT For gardeners who do their best work in the shade, one of the most useful and beautiful plants is the hosta. This perennial comes in blue, green, yellow, and variegated varieties, has a range of sizes, and produces...

The Midnight Disease: the Drive to write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain.(Books)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 4, 2004... THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE: The Drive to write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain ALICE W. FLAHERTY The compulsive drive to write is called hypergraphia. Neuroscientists such as Flaherty are interested in how creative desire ebbs and flows...

The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes.(Books)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 4, 2004... THE INVISIBLE CENTURY: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes RICHARD PANEK Before the turn of the 20th century, scientists were by and large using new tools--microscopes and telescopes--to validate past observations and...

Monturiol's Dream: the Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the world.(Books)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 4, 2004... MONTURIOL'S DREAM: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the world MATTHEW STEWART Today, most submarines troll the oceans as part of military fleets. That, however, was not what Narcis Monturiol intended when...

Funny pages.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 4, 2004... Horvath and Toffel's comparison of the environmental impacts of the paper versus the electronic editions of the New York Times is a bit misleading ("Newspaper's Footprint: Environmental toll of all the news that's fit to print," SN: 6/12/04, p....

Squashed.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 4, 2004... Does it really take a team of scientists running computer simulations to come up with the common sense that the greater the common surface area of two objects that touch, the more efficient the stacking ("Squashed spheres set a record for...

No deep breathing: air pollution impedes lung development.(This Week)
September 11, 2004... Spending one's childhood in a community with polluted air stalls lung development roughly as much as does having a mother who smokes, according to a study of children growing up in southern California. That finding lengthens the list of...

Cool harvest: frost on sea ice may boost atmosphere's bromine.(This Week)
September 11, 2004... Frost flowers, the delicate crystals that sometimes grow atop fresh sea ice, can be a substantial source of ozone-destroying bromine in the lower atmosphere near the poles, researchers suggest. Over tropical and temperate seas, salt spray...

Model growth: simulations expose branching nature of polymer crystals.(This Week)
September 11, 2004... The intricate shapes of snowflakes have long fascinated scientists, but water isn't the only fluid that freezes into elaborate crystal structures. Polymers and metal alloys do the same. Now, scientists in the United States and Hungary have...

An exploitable mutation: defect might make some lung cancers treatable.(This Week)
September 11, 2004... Nonsmokers who develop lung cancer are more likely than their smoking counterparts to have a mutation in a gene called EGFR, a new study shows. The discovery could be good news for these nonsmokers because tumors that have this genetic...

Falling into, place: atom mist yields nanobricks and mortar.(This Week)(nanotechnology)
September 11, 2004... Nanotechnologists envision using tiny structures to create ultrastrong materials and to build memory chips that store entire libraries. But these visions require making matter behave in exceptionally orderly ways. Now, materials scientists...

A very spatial brain defect: gene disorder blocks neural path for vision.(This Week)(Williams syndrome)
September 11, 2004... Among its many unusual symptoms, the genetic disorder called Williams syndrome robs people of depth perception and the ability to visualize how different parts assemble into larger objects, as in a simple jigsaw puzzle. An unusual scarcity...

Super bird: cooing doves flex extra-fast muscles.(This Week)
September 11, 2004... The power behind a ring dove's trill belongs to the fastest class of vertebrate muscles known, reports a team of physiologists. This is the first demonstration of superfast muscles in a bird, the researchers say. These muscles contract...

A really cool map.(This Week)(map of Saturn's rings)(Brief Article)
September 11, 2004... This near-infrared image of Saturn's rings, released by NASA on Sept. 2, provides the most detailed temperature map ever taken of the icy particles encircling the planet. Taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 1, the false-color image shows...

Figuring out fibroids: studies examine a common, yet mysterious, tumor.
September 11, 2004... There was a lot that Cynthia Morton didn't know about uterine fibroids when she began studying them in 1989. She didn't know, for instance, that she already had or would soon develop one. That revelation came during her pregnancy in 1991, when...

The ultimate crop insurance: a new treaty strives to save 10,000 years of plant breeding.(Convention on Biological Diversity)
September 11, 2004... In late summer 2002, looters threatened war-engulfed Afghanistan's agricultural heritage. Unknown pillagers dumped stocks of carefully labeled seeds as they ransacked buildings in Ghazni and Jalalabad, where the material had been hidden for...

Immune reaction to poison gas brings delayed effects.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
September 11, 2004... In the weeks following their poisoning by carbon monoxide gas, some survivors develop concentration problems, personality changes, or sensory impairments. The causes of these neurological symptoms and their delayed onset have perplexed...

Owls use tools: dung is lure for beetles.(Biology)(Brief Article)
September 11, 2004... Burrowing owls' habit of bringing mammal dung to their burrows is an example of tool use, researchers say. The dung attracts beetles, an important part of owl diets, the scientists have found. Owl watchers have long known that Athene...

Compost reduces landfill gas.(Environment)(Brief Article)
September 11, 2004... Mountains of decomposing garbage release about 10 million metric tons of methane each year in the United States alone. To reduce gas from landfills, communities should start treating them more like backyard gardens, a report in the Sept. 1...

Juice could ward off cancer in smokers.(Food & Nutrition)(grapefruit juice )(Brief Article)
September 11, 2004... Although citrus products confer numerous health benefits to the population as a whole, a new study shows that citrus is a particularly wise dietary choice for smokers. According to researchers at the University of Hawaii's Cancer Research...

Molecular machines split water.(Energy)(Brief Article)
September 11, 2004... Instead of running fuel cells on hydrogen derived from fossil fuels, a future hydrogen economy might be driven by water and sunlight. Inspired by natural photosynthesis, chemists at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in...

Gold quantum dots.(Physics)(Brief Article)
September 11, 2004... Scientists have created a new type of quantum dot that could find applications in everything from biological imaging to computer displays. Like their semiconductor counterparts (SN: 2/15/03, p. 107), these tiny clusters of gold atoms fluoresce...

Meteorites may have delivered phosphorus.(Astrochemistry)(Brief Article)
September 11, 2004... Phosphorus is an essential atomic ingredient in DNA, RNA, and cell membranes. But, compared with other must-have elements such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, phosphorus is the least abundant on Earth, says Matthew Pasek of the...

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 11, 2004... BETTER OFF: Flipping the Switch on Technology ERIC BRENDE For his master's degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brende turned in an antithesis, at least by MIT standards. He researched how technology makes our lives more...

How Smart Is Your Dog? 30 Fun Science Activities with Your Pet.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 11, 2004... HOW SMART IS YOUR DOG? 30 Fun Science Activities with Your Pet D. CAROLINE COILE Did you know that a nose print is just as unique to a dog as a fingerprint is to a person? This and other facts are intended to give children a sense of how...

Lords and Lemurs: Mad Scientists, Kings with Spears, and the Survival of Diversity in Madagascar.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 11, 2004... LORDS AND LEMURS: Mad Scientists, Kings with Spears, and the Survival of Diversity In Madagascar ALISON JOLLY For 40 years, Jolly has lived and worked in an unusual enclave--a place called Berenty. Owned and operated by a French family in...

On the Wild Side: Experiments in New Naturalism.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 11, 2004... ON THE WILD SIDE: Experiments in New Naturalism KEITH WILEY With images of gardens around the world, Wiley introduces elements of natural landscapes from far-flung places, including the and landscape of Colorado and the flowering hillsides...

Out of This World: Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 11, 2004... OUT OF THIS WORLD: Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics STEPHEN WEBB If people could figure out exactly how the universe is put together, then they might be more certain about how it started and how...

Say what?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 11, 2004... I don't think anyone should be surprised that squirrels have figured out how to say "nyah, nyah" to rattlesnakes ("Ultrasound alarms by ground squirrels," SN: 7/3/04, p. 14). After all, it's what they've been saying to cats, dogs, and...

Weather or not.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 11, 2004... It is very disappointing that "Dead Heat: The health consequences of global warming could be many" (SN: 7/3/04, p. 10) has not a word about any disagreement surrounding the health and related consequences of global warming, let alone of any...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
September 11, 2004... In "Parting Shots" (SN: 7/31/04, p. 74) and "3-D solar eruptions" (SN: 8/21/04, p. 125), researcher Joseph M. Davila was misidentified. He is affiliated with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Sky lights: picture might show an extrasolar planet.(This Week)(near-infrared light)
September 18, 2004... A few faint pixels of red light may constitute the first picture ever taken of a planet outside the solar system. The near-infrared light comes from an object residing close to a brown dwarf 230 light-years from Earth. A brown dwarf forms...

Mothering malnutrition: moms' depression weighs on infants in Pakistan.(This Week)
September 18, 2004... In southern Asia, where an estimated 75 million children qualify as malnourished, lack of food may only be part of the problem. A prospective study in rural Pakistan finds that mothers who became depressed shortly before or after giving birth...

Nanotech goes to new lengths: scientists create ultralong carbon nanotubes.(This Week)
September 18, 2004... Good news for Rumpelstiltskin. Scientists have made another advance toward spinning the world's strongest fibers out of molecule-thin nanotubes. Last year, Jie Liu of Duke University in Durham, N.C., and his colleagues grew carbon...

Flies "R" us: fruit fly cells mimic the mammalian pancreas.(This Week)(Drosophila melanogaster)
September 18, 2004... Chalk up yet another surprise from the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which serves as the quintessential model for investigating genetics and many diseases. A new study suggests that the tiny insects and people share even more...

Pirates of the amphibian: males fertilize eggs of another guy's gal.(This Week)
September 18, 2004... Male frogs in a mountain pond sneak their sperm directly onto egg masses of a female who's already mated with another male, an extra effort at fatherhood that scientists haven't reported before in amphibians, says an international team. In the...

Tapping an unlikely source: scientists use mouth membrane to construct corneal-surface transplants.(This Week)
September 18, 2004... Japanese researchers have repaired the corneas in four people whose vision had been nearly wiped out by eye disease. But rather than transplant corneal tissue, the scientists fashioned a new outer layer for the damaged corneas from bits of...

Motor ways: gene mutation impairs muscle coordination.(This Week)(Joubert syndrome)
September 18, 2004... Individuals with a rare inherited disorder called Joubert syndrome are clumsy when they walk or use their hands, and they have irregular breathing and eye movements. Patients with severe symptoms tend to die young. Scientists have now...

In the Neandertal mind: our evolutionary comrades celebrated vaunted intellects before meeting a memorable demise.
September 18, 2004... Call a person a Neandertal, and no one within earshot will mistake the statement for a compliment. It's a common, convenient way to east someone as a stupid, brutish lout. From an evolutionary perspective, the invective has no basis in truth,...

Extreme impersonations: frigid atomic clouds mimic neutron stars, exotic superconductors, and the newborn universe.
September 18, 2004... Extreme physical conditions have a way of bringing out the strangest behaviors that nature can muster. Just ask physicist John E. Thomas. Two years ago, he and his colleagues at Duke University in Durham, N.C., were working with intense lasers...

The woman who lost her capacity to dream.(Neuroscience)(Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2004... Four days after suffering a brain-damaging stroke, a 73-year-old woman told her physicians of a startling development. In addition to experiencing mild vision problems sparked by the stroke, she had stopped dreaming. This woman offered...

Beryllium data confirm stars' age.(Astronomy)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2004... Astronomers have gathered additional evidence that stars began forming when the universe was less than 200 million years old. Although first-generation stars have never been observed, researchers can determine their age by measuring...

Liver transplants succeed in many hepatitis C patients.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2004... People with the liver-wrecking hepatitis C virus who receive liver transplants are usually considered to have poor prospects because physicians expect the disease to attack the transplant within a few years. But researchers now report that...

Human ancestor gets leg up on walking.(Anthropology)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2004... One of the earliest known hominids, a 6-million-year-old member of humanity's evolutionary family, walked upright with nearly the same facility as do people today, according to a new fossil analysis. In 2001, a French team recovered teeth...

Crashing Genesis.(Astronomy)(accident of space probe)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2004... Hollywood stunt pilots had rehearsed the routine for more than a month: Snare the small Genesis space capsule and its precious samples of solar material as the vessel parachuted to Earth. But the final scene didn't follow the script. ...

A new, slimy method of self-pollination.(Botany)(pollen-laden oil)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2004... When all else fails for pollination, a yellow flower in the ginger family relies on a substance that botanists say they've never seen before: a do-it-yourself oil slick. Caulokaempferia coenobialis hangs on rock faces in the humid forests...

Nature reduces kids' signs of attention disorder.(Environment)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2004... Does spending more playtime amid greenery improve behavior in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder? To find out, Frances Kuo and Andrea Faber Taylor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed a...

Staph bacteria are choosy about their iron source.(Microbiology)(Staphylococcus aureus)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2004... Some people prefer to get their iron from spinach rather than from steak. Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium that causes staph infections, also has a favored iron source, a new study reveals. This bacterium needs iron for several...

Beasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 18, 2004... DAVID RAINS WALLACE Mammals evolved at about the same time as dinosaurs did, but dinosaurs get all the attention, claims Wallace. Mammals have their own "Cinderella story" that is in some ways better than the dinosaurs' tale. For about 150...

Grass Scapes: Gardening with Ornamental Grasses.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 18, 2004... MARTIN QUINN AND CATHERINE MACLEOD In response to the trend of using ornamental grasses not just as ground covers, but also as garden specimens and sculptural elements, this guide showcases more than 100 varieties of grasses, explaining how...

His Brother's Keeper: a Story from the Edge of Medicine.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 18, 2004... JONATHAN WEINER Although they lived on opposite coasts and had very different jobs, the brothers Stephen and Jamie Heywood were best friends. When Stephen, the younger brother, was diagnosed with the fatal disease amyotrophic lateral...

The Universal Book of Mathematics: From Abracadabra to Zeno's Paradoxes.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 18, 2004... DAVID DARLING With extended entries that go beyond simple definitions, this unusual book explains concepts, profiles mathematicians, documents unsolved theorems, and describes the tools of the math trade. By making understandable topics...

What Makes Biology Unique: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 18, 2004... ERNST MAYR AS his 100th birthday approaches, Mayr offers this "survey of controversial concepts" in biology and evolutionary thought. Some of these essay have been revised from earlier publications. Others are new. In all, one of the...

A Pauling oversight.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 18, 2004... I was surprised to find no mention of Linus Pauling's theory of anesthesia in "Comfortably Numb" (SN: 7/3,/04, p. 8). In 1961, Pauling provided detailed arguments that interactions between anesthetic agents and water, rather than lipids, form...

Teardrop eyewash?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 18, 2004... The teardrop shape of Venus away from the centermost part of the sun ("Heavenly Passage" SN: 7/10/04, p. 24) simply is caused by the photographic surface being planar, rather than spherical. The image can never be represented without distortion...

Into the groove.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 18, 2004... In the close-up from the Cassini spacecraft, some of Saturn's rings look rather like grooves in a phonograph record ("Titanic Images, Groovy Shots: Cassini arrives at Saturn" SN: 7/10/04, p. 22). I wonder if anyone has tried mapping those...

Who needs 'em?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 18, 2004... Not to detract from this project's accomplishments or its potential ("Outer space on the cheap," SN: 7/17/04, p. 46), but does space really need tourists? It's not a sideshow. It will still be dangerous and expensive. Assuming that space travel...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
September 18, 2004... Correction "Rocky Road: Planet hunting gets closer to Earth" (SN: 9/4/04, p. 147) misnamed the telescope used to find a planet at star 55 Cancri. Astronomers made the observation at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope near Fort Davis, Texas.

Big gulp? Neck ribs may have given aquatic beast unique feeding style.(This Week)
September 25, 2004... The fossilized neck bones of a 230-million-year-old sea creature have features suggesting that the animal's snakelike throat could flare open and create suction that would pull in prey. Such a feeding strategy has never before been proposed for...

Sleep on it: fitful slumber tied to diabetes risk.(This Week)
September 25, 2004... Many people have brief bouts of interrupted breathing during the night that cause fluctuations in blood pressure and heart rate, decreased concentrations of oxygen in the blood, and other effects. Small studies have implicated this disturbed...

Morphinefree mutant poppies: novel plants make pharmaceutical starter.(This Week)
September 25, 2004... A Tasmanian company has developed a poppy that produces a commercially useful drug precursor instead of full-fledged morphine, and an international research team has now reported how the plant does it. The top1 mutant of the opium poppy...

Spooky timing: quantum-linked photons coordinate clock ticks.(This Week)
September 25, 2004... Check out the closest half-dozen timepieces, and they're almost certain to disagree by at least a few seconds. That variation doesn't cut it for global data networks or fleets of satellites, where even microsecond differences among clocks can...

Roma record: paths of the Gypsy population's diasporas.(This Week)
September 25, 2004... The Gypsies' meandering past has left the group with little history. A new study shows that genetics can trace their centuries-old paths. The findings could be a boon not only for historians but also for researchers studying human genetics and...

Walking away from dementia: moderate exercise protects aging minds.(This Week)
September 25, 2004... Two fresh studies strengthen the case that physical activity protects the aging brain from decline. Walking a couple of miles a day at a moderate pace appears to make a difference. Past studies have linked both physical and mental...

Deep squeeze: experiments point to methane in Earth's mantle.(This Week)
September 25, 2004... Although today's fossil fuel reserves reside in Earth's crust, a new study suggests that hydrocarbon fuel might also nestle in the mantle, at depths of 100 kilometers or more. Determining whether fossil fuels can form in these extreme...

Hungry for nano: the fruits of nanotechnology could transform the food industry.
September 25, 2004... When it comes to nanotechnology, almost every industry wants a piece of the action. For more than a decade, the electronics industry has been exploiting the tools of nanotechnology for the development of high-performance computer chips. More...